“X” MARKS THE SPOT

I had a strange experience on voting day last week. I don’t mean something particularly constitutionally or legally unusual or anything of that sort. There were no electoral shenanigans that I was aware of, nor undue pressures being put upon me by lurking strangers in shiny suits or anything like that. I was  just the experience itself that led to me having to have a little bit of a leap of imagination and left me having to rethink a few of my thoughts on the electoral system of which I am usually such a proud and (literally) stout defender of.

I recent years, due to other commitments and the vagaries of the public transport network timings, the beloved and I have been known to be standing outside our polling station as it opened up in the morning, rather giving the officials, I fear, the idea that maybe they were in for something of a busy old day. This time, however, our Thursday was not going to be nearly so busy and so we decided that we would risk the huge queues and do our voting duties on our way home from work. So, in the late evening, under the gathering clouds, we pulled up outside in our car on our way back from the station and prepared to wait in line amongst the hordes of voters.

We were still the only ones there. I asked the official if they’d had a busy day and they said not really as there were only two hundred or so actual voters listed for that particular polling station. Given the massive queues we witnessed on the news during the last general election I had to conclude that this was either way below the average number for an individual polling station, or that turning up five minutes before they are due to close is a terribly bad idea.

Anyway, the pleasantries over, and our identities confirmed, we were handed our voting slips and headed off to those strange wooden temporary structures that we have to vote in and the democratic process was about to be duly executed when something strange happened. I looked at the tiny bit of paper I’d been given and there were only three names upon it. Now, you might think that there’s nothing unusual in that given that we have three main political parties in this great nation of ours, but the strange thing was that the three names were not the ones you would usually expect to find there. Granted two of them were, but, given the fact that both of those parties were currently in power nationally and pursuing policies that I was not entirely in favour of, and that the third was a party usually considered to be one of the “fringe” parties at best, I did start to wonder quite what had happened to the main opposition in my area to make them think that it wasn’t even worth showing up.

I was suddenly left in a bit of a quandary with regards to my decision of who to actually cast my vote for, and this had never actually happened to me before. I was so nonplussed that I almost went back to ask whether I’d been given a damaged voting slip and was thinking about it very seriously except I suddenly realised that I vaguely remembered seeing one of the slips pinned to the door as I had come in, and that had had only had three names on it, so I decided that this was probably how things were meant to be and cast my vote accordingly, which might just help one day to (partly) explain a slight blip in the statistics for Lesser Blogfordshire for any unlikely future historical researchers.

Another strange experience during the process of exercising my democratic rights was the rare opportunity of voting in a referendum. This is the very first time in my life that I had had the chance to do so because, despite my great age, the only previous time it had happened, I was not old enough to vote (believe it or not…).

Afterwards, as we skipped merrily back to the car, the beloved and I discussed our various experiences of this unusual day’s voting and she asked me a very pertinent question about the pertinent question of the referendum. She’d decided how she wanted to vote, of course, but in a “yes/no” situation it’s always wise to read the wording of the question just to make sure that you weren’t being tricked by a devious political mind. I’ve seen the “House of Cards” trilogy and “The Thick of It”, I know how shifty these people can be.

Unfortunately this was the moment at which I realised that I hadn’t actually read the question. Having read most of the literature I had received, I already knew how I wanted to vote, which side of the fence I had chosen to sit upon, and which box I intended to put my own particular cross in before I entered the booth. I’d thought about it, considered all my options and come to my conclusion and headed into the polling station having set my jaw and some of my chins determinedly in a way those old-fashioned heroes of the pulp stories of the early twentieth century might have been proud of. It never crossed my mind that the question might have been written with a little bit of reverse psychology and that it might have turned out to be one of those tricky little situations where “yes” might mean “no” or “no” might mean “yes”.

You know the sort of thing; “Do you, a wise and altogether clever and understanding sort of a chap, think that changing the voting system would be a terrifically bad idea?’ Answering “yes” when you might have meant “no” to that (or vice versa) might have skewed the results a tad, I feel.

Tricky stuff.

Still, it turns out that things were less complicated than that and in this case “yes” meant “yes” and “no” meant “no” and everybody seemed to understand that, it seems. Although it did give me that ‘tricky’ moment of doubt as we strolled away happy in the knowledge that our duty had been done. Other people, I suspect, found the day less satisfying, which tends to be the way with these things. For every one person who finds an election turns out as they had hoped, there’ll be another who is deeply dissatisfied with it. Mind you, I still think that, once the results were all in the following day, it must have been rather strange to find yourself living in one of those very few boroughs that voted against the trend set by the rest of the country. “How could everyone else be so out of touch with us and what we think?” the Islington chattering classes and the intellectuals of Oxbridge might very well have been asking each other around their dining tables last weekend, “How could everyone else be so wrong?” when maybe they should have been thinking that 69% of those who voted in these various conjoined countries may very well have disagreed with them for a reason. That said, there were 31% of people who voted across the country who were in favour but lived in boroughs where more people were not, so maybe I am being a tad uncharitable there.

It’s too early to tell, of course, whether these decisions will turn out to be the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ones, but when certain boroughs end up having to toss a coin to decide who runs their council, or the percentages of the margin of victory in a referendum can be 0.01%, it does rather show the lie in that pathetic old argument from people who choose not to vote because they think that it doesn’t make any difference whether they do or not. Sometimes we all need to be reminded how many sacrifices have been made through the years to give ordinary people like us the opportunity to vote and it does seem rather disrespectful not to do so. I really don’t care how anyone actually chooses to cast their vote, just so long as they actually do turn up and cast it, but then I’m old-fashioned about things like that because I have a great deal of respect for the history that has led to giving us the freedoms that we do sometimes seem to take too much for granted.

So, no matter how tricky the choice can sometimes be, especially if there seems to be no real choice at all, next time make sure you go and put that “X” in the little box of your choice, because 48% of those who had the option to vote chose not to do so last week which is a bit of a shame when you come to think about it, and if all of those people had been in the ‘alternative’ camp, which is statistically unlikely I know, then the result could have been very different indeed. These things do matter, you know…